“I guess I don’t need to ask if you were drunk.” Tanner’s lip curled. “You smell like a distillery.”
People said the two of us looked a lot alike, only he was the respectable, clean-cut version of me. We were like a before-and-after makeover. Which one of us was the “before” and which was the “after” depended on whether you liked good boys or bad boys.
“I need to take a shower.” I shouldered past him and headed for the bathroom. “Gimme five minutes.”
“That’s all you get,” Tanner shouted as I slammed the bathroom door on him. “I’m walking out that door in exactly five minutes, with or without you. I can’t afford to be late. Dad’s already pissed at me.”
“Why’s Dad pissed at you?” I called through the door while I waited for the water in the shower to get hot.
“Work stuff. You don’t want to hear about it.”
He was right about that. Tanner had foolishly let himself get suckered into working for the family business. Unlike me, he’d always followed the straight and narrow path, trying to please everyone and do what was expected of him.
You know what it had gotten him? A shitty mid-management sales job at the creamery and both Dad and our asswipe older brother Nate hounding him constantly about work. Tanner was living proof that my personal strategy of giving all that company bullshit the finger was the superior one.
I jumped in the shower and stood there for a minute letting the hot water soak away some of the aches in my bones. By the time I’d washed and shampooed, I felt a lot more human. I dried myself off, applied a liberal coating of deodorant, and ran my hands through my hair before yanking open the bathroom door.
Tanner threw his arm across his eyes as I strode through the apartment on my way to the bedroom. “Aww, dammit, Wyatt! Cover yourself up. I didn’t need to see that before breakfast.”
I ignored him as I dug around for a pair of clean underpants. “After we get all this shit over with, can you drop me off at the Palace? I left my truck there.”
“How’d you get home?”
“Andie drove me.”
My last decent clean shirt was the one I’d slept in last night, so I rummaged around until I found an old T-shirt that had been shoved into the back of one of my dresser drawers.
“Did she now?” Even from the next room, I could hear the implication in Tanner’s tone.
“Don’t start,” I warned as I dragged on a pair of jeans.
Tanner was the only other person who knew about my long-standing crush on Andie, and he’d been pushing me to declare myself to her for years. He’d always been one of those romantic saps who wore his heart on his sleeve, and he had this idea that if I confessed my undying love to Andie, everything would somehow magically work itself out and we’d live happily ever after. Like I said, Tanner was a sap.
“I’m ready,” I said, coming out of the bedroom and shoving my feet into a pair of tennis shoes.
Tanner stared at me. “That’s not what you’re wearing.”
He was wearing a dress shirt and blazer. I reckoned I might be underdressed.
“It’s all I’ve got that’s clean.” I grabbed my keys on my way out the door, twirling them around my index finger as I waited for Tanner to catch up. “Let’s roll.”
“The shop” was the site of the original creamery and retail ice cream shop our great-grandfather had opened on Main Street in 1921. Even though we had the big plant now, with a cafeteria and ice cream tasting room that was open to the public, we kept the shop in town open—with a nice subsidy from the taxpayers of Crowder—to help attract tourists into the downtown commercial district. The original ice cream making facilities had been restored and converted into an ice cream museum attached to the shop, which had an old-timey soda fountain vibe.
I hadn’t actually been inside the place in years. I hated ice cream, and I especially hated my family’s ice cream. Growing up, we’d had ice cream for dessert every single night. Which probably sounded great to most people and made me seem like an entitled little shit for complaining about it, but it had pretty much ruined ice cream for me. There had never been any other kind of sweets allowed in the house. No cookies, no candy, not a single goddamn Ding Dong. It was ice cream or nothing. On our birthdays we got an ice cream cake—which was also what we had at Thanksgiving and Christmas instead of eating pie like regular people.
My headache, which had begun to recede, roared to life again as soon as I walked in the back door of the shop and heard the clamor of my family’s voices. My dad was at one end of the room looking ticked off, growling at everyone in earshot, and generally sucking all the oxygen out of the room like he always did.
I hung back as Tanner slunk in and tried to put himself in Dad’s eyeline so his presence would be noted without actually attracting too much of the old man’s attention. Surveying the assemblage, I spotted my brother Ryan’s red hair in the crowd and headed in that direction.
Before I’d made it halfway there, I was attacked by a three-foot-high tornado that nearly racked me as it attached itself to my leg. Peeling it off, I tossed it up into the air before peering into the giggling face of my niece, Isabella.
“Again,” she commanded, and I obliged her because I was a sucker for the little munchkin.
“Don’t get her too keyed up,” her father Manny said, looking tired as he trailed after her. “We’re trying to keep her from melting down until we get this picture taken.”
Isabella bounced in my arms. “More! More!” She shared Manny’s jet-black hair and light brown complexion, but her curls and her huge round eyes were one hundred percent her mother’s.
“Can’t right now.” I switched her to my left side and balanced her on my hip, trying not to wrinkle her pretty yellow dress. “My arms are too tired because you’re getting so big.”
Manny’s mouth twisted into a sardonic grin as his gaze settled on my chest. “Nice shirt.”
Manny’s father, Manuel Sr., had been my dad’s best friend and right-hand man at the creamery. When Manny was ten years old, both his parents had died in a boating accident and my parents had adopted him. Although Manny had kept the Reyes family name, he was as much a part of the King family as any of my other siblings.
Isabella’s tiny fingers touched my sore cheekbone. “Why’s your face look like that?”
“It’s bruised ’cause I ran into something.”
“Boo-boo.” She smacked a wet kiss on my cheek. “Make it all better.”
“Thanks, it feels better already.” I returned her kiss with a loud sucking sound that made her giggle and try to squirm away.
“Whose fist was it?” Manny asked.
“No one important.” While Isabella played with my hair, I glanced across the room at Manny’s wife, who was sitting with her bare feet propped up on a chair. “When’s Adriana’s due date again?”
“Eight more weeks.” Manny rubbed his forehead. “I might need your help painting the nursery. I’m starting to get a little underwater.” Manny had followed in his father’s footsteps and gone to work for my dad, who’d recently put him in charge of all our plant operations.